How Dictatorship Built Taiwan's Democracy

the Kuomintang. By now, the KMT has held Taiwan with an iron fist for nearly forty years.

Yet Taiwan is no backwater nation suffering unhinged despotic mismanagement. Here, business

is booming. Since the KMT took charge in 1949, GDP per capita has risen nearly 600%, elevating

Taiwan from one of the world’s poorest countries to one of almost middle-income. Popular support

for Chiang and the KMT is deep and widespread. And yet, on September 28, a new political

challenger arrived in Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party.

You can probably guess how they felt about dictatorship,

and how Taiwan’s dictator felt about them. I just want you to know I hate you.

I hate you too. Except… Chiang didn’t

repress the DPP. Instead, within a year, he formally ended martial law on the island,

unraveling the KMT’s iron grip and setting in motion Taiwan’s democratization which would end

in the KMT’s electoral defeat and loss of power. And nobody forced Chiang to do this,

nor made his KMT successors follow in his footsteps. The DPP was a tiny,

essentially insignificant clique of intellectuals. The KMT could have continued ruling as they had.

In essence, Taiwan shouldn’t be a democracy. So, why did the KMT go along with democratization?

And what lessons does Taiwan’s unique story hold for us?

To understand Taiwan, one must first understand the party that ruled it: the Kuomintang.

The KMT was founded in mainland China in the early 20th century, just as China’s final

imperial dynasty reached its end. By 1928, the KMT—led by Chiang Ching-kuo’s Father

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek—was in charge of the entire country, at least on paper.

In reality, though, the growing Communist movement in China led an armed resistance

effort from the Jinggang mountains, and by 1931 the Japanese empire was already

seizing territory in China’s northeast. At the same time, the KMT itself was debilitated by

cronyism and corruption, leaving the party with a paper-thin hold on the country.

Although the Communists and KMT worked together to fend off the Japanese invasion,

civil war resumed in the wake of Japan’s defeat in world war two. The communists,

with their firm base of support among the nation’s enormous peasantry, quickly gained the upper hand

over the divided and incompetent KMT. In 1949, facing sure defeat, the KMT government, along

with the remnants of the republican army, fled the mainland and made for the nearby island of Taiwan.

Never infiltrated by Communists and handed over to the KMT government by the Japanese

just a few years earlier, Taiwan was a natural base of operations. However, it wasn’t without

its challenges, as many indigenous islanders resented being passed back and forth between the

Japanese and these mainlanders. The Kuomintang, now especially short on patience for unruly

farmers, repressed the people brutally, in one instance killing as many as 28,000 civilians.

It was an ugly start to the KMT’s rule over the island, and as time went on

party leaders came to recognize that if they ruled Taiwan as they had the mainland—a small,

corrupt elite lording incompetently and abusively over poor farmers—they would

be about as successful here as they had been back home. Something had to change.

To consolidate power, the KMT would need a new approach that could get the party